Please note: There are lots of wonderful ways to raise a child. None of these ideas are meant to be definitive. I submit the following suggestions humbly and with respect for our diversity as parents looking for ways to raise our children in a natural and spiritual environment.

I enjoy coming up with creative ways to introduce my toddler to a life centered around natural living, compassion and heightened sense of spiritual awareness. I hope the ideas here inspire you to come up with your own unique pagan parental journey. 🙂

To start, I always try to take a step back and observe my child’s abilities. What do we do on a daily basis?

How might I best modify our routine or activities to creatively guide him towards an enlightened, open-minded path?

How do I steer him away from all the flashing lights and plastic and television that surrounds him and encourage him seek out the intrinsic beauty of the world?

Those are some pretty big questions!

The first goal I made for this year started with eliminating plastic toys.

Instead, I aimed to surround him with more natural materials like cloth, wood & metal.

A lot of people think natural toys come attached to big price tags, but I found this completely untrue!

To begin with, for us, minimalism works when it comes to toys. I discovered (quite to my surprise) that while plastic toys with flashing lights and noisy gizmos engage my child briefly and intensely, he lost interest in them quickly and they became useless objects discarded in the toy box.

This made them addictive, and I found myself purchasing new ones almost weekly to keep him occupied.

Now that gets expensive!

On the flip side, when I introduced him to simple, traditional toys, it took a while for him to become interested, but once they engaged him, he played with them for hours and returned to them over and over. Which in the long run, works out to be much cheaper.

But even the upfront investment in natural, simple toys need not be prohibitive.

If you are open to purchasing used or antique toys, thrift stores offer a great opportunity to find affordable toys like wood cars, rocking horses and blocks. Just be mindful about things like lead paint, and small parts that pose a choking risk.

However, if this idea makes you too nervous, you still have lots of options! I found wood and cloth toys very affordably at IKEA. Or, if your budget gives you some freedom, Plan Toys makes excellent toys made of sustainable materials.

Anyway you get them, I found less is more when it comes to toys. Rotating a few toys proved more effective for us, engaged my toddler longer and let his natural abilities shine through to me.

For example, he loves wheels, and will play with the gears on this cast iron toy bike, endlessly hypnotized by the way it moves.

All of this inspired us to make a decision I never thought we’d make: We opted to enroll our child in a Catholic Montessori preschool.

I know a lot of pagans have difficult or complicated histories with Catholicism and Christianity in general and I don’t want to negate that.

Personally, my experience with Christianity has been largely positive, so sending my child to a Catholic school poses no conflict for me or my husband—although filling out sections in the application truthfully without raising any eyebrows proved amusing:

“What denomination are you?”

(Uh, Unitarian Universalist? We’ll go with that.)

I know his school teaches religious education as part of the curriculum.

I’m personally very comfortable with that.

I really want to steep my child in a spiritual community——even if it’s not mine.

Neopagan religions generally don’t encourage proselytization.

My husband isn’t pagan, no one in my (biological) family is pagan and I’ve never suggested any of them should become pagan.

To me, that extends to my child. Of course I’d love to raise a “second gen” and have a child who is as enthusiastic about my path as I am—but I expect him to carve his own way, and I see my role as one of guided exposure, not predetermination.

I will teach him about my traditions as we go, but ultimately, when he reaches adulthood, I am called most to expose him widely to many different faiths so that he might make his spiritual and religious choices with as much information as possible.

Although Catholicism piques my interest spiritually (in particular, the idea of prayer to Mary, the high ritualism of ceremony, and the sacredness of art in Catholicism fascinate me) the “Catholic” part of this preschool seemed almost beside the point.

What really intrigued me was the Montessori approach, which has no association with paganism, but it feels pagan to me—the emphasis on both individuality and community, a progressive approach to education and the respect for children as human beings with their own minds really appeals to me.

Oh, and in the school we chose, there’s no plastic toys! 🙂

So we’ve covered toys and school. Now let’s eat.

Food and mealtimes gave me another great opportunity to encourage natural living in my toddler. In this respect, the universe blessed us generously.

I know not all parents have the time to prepare homemade food for every meal.

I was very lucky to have the option to work part time and I chose to do just that, so I have room in my schedule to cook a lot.

Having said that, if feeding your child “real food” from scratch is something that’s important to you, don’t be discouraged! It’s not impossible to do it with even time constraints.

Actually, although I enjoy cooking, I don’t really need to cook much at all. Raw fruits and veggies make up most of my toddler’s diet. I buy some prepackaged things, like plain Greek yogurt and whole wheat pasta, but for the most part, I stick with totally unprocessed foods.

I make large batches and freeze them in single serving portions. Homemade bread, quiche to reheat for breakfast, sweet potato mash, and all the other 10,000,000,000 recipe ideas on Pinterest I’ve yet to try make great freezer meals without the preservatives.

I also banned plastic tableware. I noticed something whilst traveling overseas to . . . almost any other country in the world—-Americans take for granted that everything a child touches must be made of plastic.

I noticed in other places, families sat even the smallest children at the table to use tiny versions of the adult tableware. Very early on, the children learn to handle these items with care, whereas American children treat tableware roughly well into the preschool years.

I picked out several wood bowls, as well as small “toddler sized” metal and wood spoons.

I compromised on sippy cups. If you live overseas, you might be quick to point out that everyone else also teaches their children to drink out of a glass between 12-16 months. You guys are awesome. I don’t how you do it. My kid throws a cup across the room as soon as I put it in front of him. So we do sippy cups.

In small ways, we even started to help our toddler make the connection to his food and the places it comes from by visiting pick-your-own farms where he could actually eat fruit right off the tree. We particularly enjoyed our experience at the peach farm last month!

Finally, one positive step forward to natural living that nearly everyone will find rewarding and achievable is a “screen free” hour every day. I don’t let my toddler use any screened device at all yet, but I also don’t want him to constantly be surrounded by other people using them, so I try to take him on regular nature walks and I make it a point not to bring my phone. It’s good for both of us.

And we have the good fortune to live near the Civil War battlefields, which are among the most beautiful trails in the world.

Towards the end of this year, I look forward to celebrating the Sabbats with my toddler, because he’s already old enough to start appreciating little things about them. I’ll try to make some footnotes around the coming Sabbats about how that goes!

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Published by moodymoons

2 Comments

Thanks for this article 😉 i live overseas and its soooo true that we use miniversions of tableware first and normal ones quickly after. The drinking glasses not really; they get thrown or put down harshly too 😂😂

This is awesome! My child is almost 10 and she’s showing an interest in Pagan themes. I sometimes wish that I had discovered my path when she was of a toddler’s age! It seems so fun and rewarding :). Can’t wait to hear about the Sabbats!